What is a day?
Twenty-four hours of sixty minutes each, and these divided into sixty seconds.
You’ll sleep for eight of those hours, if you’re lucky.
Today was a beautiful day: cloudless blue, mid-eighties at the highest, virtually humidity-free.
We spent it indoors, painting.
It had to be done. The disaster happened in January, for pity’s sake, and it took us weeks to replace the washer and dryer, and months to replace the carpet. The last repairs will be (glory!) done on Monday.
Today was the day to paint.
Apricot on the north walls, dusted plum on the west, olive on the east walls and burgundy on the south.
It’s beautiful.
And the children were troopers. They helped some, and hung around. William read Harry Potter, Everett read Eragon, Emma Grace played quietly with Polly Pockets on the floor. In the afternoon the boys took Emma on a hike along the creek.
But I thought it More Than Once as I dipped my brush into the burgundy paint, “It’s a beautiful day.” And it occurred to me Several Times as I climbed my ladder yet again, “It’s an unusual day for July in North Carolina.” When the breeze blew through the kitchen during lunch, I was glad we were all sitting there together.
And when the sun was setting, we were eating dinner outside at the picnic table and I was watching the leaves bend in the breeze and thinking that I needed to get back inside and finish the painting, because we really don’t want to spend another day like this one tomorrow.
